Such a magical day! We took the bus to Oxford, where we met up with our dear friends MariAnne and Gail at Christ Church’s Tom Tower. After a quick tour of this astounding college town (which I’ll blog about next time) we grabbed sandwiches and dashed off to catch a bus to nearby Headington, where the renowned author C.S. Lewis lived with his brother Warnie and others.
On the bus to Headington we met a charming 85-year-old gentleman with a hat and cane. He gathered that we were going to the Lewis Close and told of meeting C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien years ago when he was a student at Oxford and was misbehaving with his classmates at a pub called The Eagle and the Child.
Evidently Lewis commented on how unruly he and the other boys were behaving. The gentleman chuckled about that experience and went on to say that his own property is adjacent to the Lewis Close. He added that his late wife is buried only 15 feet from C.S. Lewis in the Trinity Church graveyard. What an interesting chap! He brightened our day with his friendliness, stories, and delightful English accent.
At our stop, we got off the bus and took a very short walk to the Lewis Close.
As MariAnne had suggested, we ate our tasty baguette sandwiches right there in C.S. Lewis’s garden. I truly cannot think of a lovelier spot for a picnic.
Afterward we stepped inside the house for a fantastic tour by our guide Rachel, an Oxford student who resides in the house.
This is the study upstairs where Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia in the 1950s. I love that the desk is situated so that he looked out the window, which was dressed with scratchy World War I army blankets for curtains. From this desk, Lewis had a clear line of sight to the attic room, where the children he cared for during World War II would often play.
Lewis smoked a pipe and wrote his books with pen and ink.
Thankfully, Lewis’s older brother Warnie very kindly typed up the stories, enabling them to be published and enjoyed by all of us.
This door leads into the attic room where the famous wardrobe was. I won’t share my picture of the attic room itself. In case you visit someday, I feel I must leave it a bit of a mystery for you.
This is the only original doorknob in the home, and all the aspiring writers on our tour were encouraged to touch it. So we did.
Those of you who have read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe will appreciate the significance of this dish of rose and lemon flavored Turkish Delight.
Like Edmund, we could not resist the temptation.
Next we trekked on to a spot not far beyond the house called the C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve. This area was part of Lewis’s private property and includes a large pond and woods, which they say he wandered about while he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia.
The Nature Reserve felt a bit magical, I must say. It obviously creates quite a scope for the imagination.
He might have been there, but we did not encounter Tumnus the Faun nor did we find the lamppost. But nonetheless, the entire visit to the Lewis Close was most magical and memorable! Special thanks go to MariAnne who coordinated this special tour for us. We loved it!
More of Oxford itself is coming up next time.
Starlight Writer 